Absolutely, undeniably, without a shadow of a doubt.... the best traffic source in the world is:

The one you have most experience with!

Was my answer exciting enough for you? =]

But seriously, for me, I generate lots of traffic from craigslist and youtube. For only 1 reason, I've been using those 2 for the longest. So I know how to use them.

Someone will likely come in and say PPC is their best, because they know how to use it better than I do.

Or facebook, because they know how to use it better than me and the next person.

Thats why my advice is just pick 1, and master it to the point where it becomes your "safety net". Then move onto to learning another method. Master it, make it your second "safety net", then another ... and another. Eventually you'll have so many safety nets, that if you lose one, you just move back to the previous, while learning another.

Sound confusing? I hope not.

-Red

ps. Don't try to master 1001 different techniques. For the first couple years, I'd limit yourself to 4-5 max. See how they work out for you, then change things down the road. But whatever you do, never stick with just 1 method forever and ever. Thats a great way to go out of business.

Absolutely, undeniably, without a shadow of a doubt.... the best traffic source in the world is:

The one you have most experience with!

Was my answer exciting enough for you? =]

But seriously, for me, I generate lots of traffic from craigslist and youtube. For only 1 reason, I've been using those 2 for the longest. So I know how to use them.

Someone will likely come in and say PPC is their best, because they know how to use it better than I do.

Or facebook, because they know how to use it better than me and the next person.

Thats why my advice is just pick 1, and master it to the point where it becomes your "safety net". Then move onto to learning another method. Master it, make it your second "safety net", then another ... and another. Eventually you'll have so many safety nets, that if you lose one, you just move back to the previous, while learning another.

Sound confusing? I hope not.

-Red

ps. Don't try to master 1001 different techniques. For the first couple years, I'd limit yourself to 4-5 max. See how they work out for you, then change things down the road. But whatever you do, never stick with just 1 method forever and ever. Thats a great way to go out of business.

The amount of varied posts that followed this initial post just go to show exactly how accurate it is.

I can't just state one for this reason. It's like income streams, I don' have just one. Let's look at it with an offline example. I own a restaurant and I only have one entry/way into my parking lot. Well the city comes along and decides to put a culvert in on and it is going to take a lot of time. What happens to my business? I have none.

I'm a big fan of SEO as a source of traffic. I meant it is highly targeted, plus free! But if you also include paid methods in the list, PPC works really well as well. But in the end of the day, its all about what you're good at! Something doing wonders for me might not work for you. And something that turned out to be a loss for me, might do wonders for you (if done right). Getting me?

The best method is to leech or divert traffic off of the biggest sites. Those are sites that have their own search engines, and are so big many people go there first and use the internal search engine to navigate to what they want, instead of Google or Bing.

So just learn how to get people on YouTube to your videos, and from there to your url. Or, answer questions on Yahoo Answers related to your site's niche, and divert traffic to your url. Same for Facebook, Twitter, and so on.

Blog and forum commenting can deliver targeted traffic, it is free to do but it takes time and effort to write spam free comments, the more quality informative comments you make the more traffic you get, simple.
Most people give up after a while but if you keep at it you will get good results. steve.

If you had to choose one traffic strategy it would be content marketing. Content marketing exists in many different forms. The strategy that has worked best for me is video marketing with seo, and social media sharing. Videos that have taken me less then 3 minutes to do have gotten me thousands of views and targeted traffic to my website that converts from squeeze to sales to upsells.

I think guest posting, especially on high quality and high traffic blogs, works very well. Craft an incredible article and submit it to the right place and you can get many, many visitors to your site.
Thanks
Ted

SEO is the best for increase the traffic on your site
With the help of SEO u can submit your site on social sites where people
will come to your site and the traffic will increase and your business will growth

Ethical ways are the best ways of gaining a lot of traffic. Different methods works for different sites. You may be getting success through SEO and others are getting success through SEM. The most important part is doing research about market and taking steps after that.

I just want to ask you what in your opinion is the best free traffic method?

Name just ONE. The one we all should do everyday and which is the most effective!

Thank you.

And see you on top.
Erwin.

Hi Erwin,

I used both free and paid traffic methods to drive traffic to my sites.

If you are talking about free traffic method, then for me, it would be blog commenting. For all my campaigns, I will try to search for good quality, relevant and of high PR blogs. From the blogs itself, you have to go through the blogs to ensure that the content is of good quality and if the readership is high either in search engine like Google or Technorati or other search engines with at least 8 or at least 10 out of all. Then, you will have a great chance to get your site ranked well. But your posting to the blogs must be of good quality too and the link(s) that you have left at the blogs will result in good traffic in a matter of time.

Once you have a decent traffic to your own site, you will have to persuade the visitors to opt in to your list with a freebie which is something of good quality too. After which, you will lots of opportunity to promote offers to the list that you have build from this stream of free traffic.

Nevertheless, for conversion purpose, I believe paid traffic still converts the best rather then free traffic based on my testing.

Hey Terry, don't you find that to be a bit time consuming verses the predictability of other traffic? I engage in forum marketing but I'm also involved in multiple niches. It becomes very frantic when trying to keep up with a multitude of forum sites. I take it you're focused in only one niche at the moment?

Hey Terry, don't you find that to be a bit time consuming verses the predictability of other traffic? I engage in forum marketing but I'm also involved in multiple niches. It becomes very frantic when trying to keep up with a multitude of forum sites. I take it you're focused in only one niche at the moment?

Thanks for chiming in.

Hi J.

It very much depends on the level of your business.

For the starter/relative newbie, forum marketing is no-cost (apart from the time spent) and offers a super-targeted audience right off the mark.

But even at a higher level, guys like Mike Filsaime and Alex Jeffreys still come back and do WSOs here once in a while so that says a lot about the power of forum marketing.

However, as you rightly say, if you're active across a load of niches, it will probably prove too time consuming or ineffective if you're handing over the content posting on those to others.

It may not be as sexy as Facebook widgets or mobile apps etc but forum marketing works - if it suits your business model/s.

No matter how many answers you get here you've got to build your list and then use it correctly. Its not free you need to probably buy an autoresponder or learn how to save your list and reupload every time you get shut down on your shared server.

If you want to go free the people who posted multiple free traffic tactics got it correct you gotta do it all to get the amount of traffic you need to really hit big like you would with a big well nourished list IMHO.

I have to say youtube without a doubt. Now it may be because I know it very well like one the warriors said, but also because I have seen what it has done to other people doing marketing through this media. In my opinion, it is also the easier if you are just starting out.

What you should do is pick a traffic method and work it until you've got it mastered. Then add another method to your marketing repeitroir and master that method. Do this until you have 3 or 4 working traffic streams. You want to make sure you're NOT just focusing on ONE traffic source because if one bites the dust you'll still have several others bringing in traffic.

1 simple traffic thatI would recommend is RSS feed syndication. Submit your RSS feed to as many RSS aggregators around the web and your content is bound to get picked up and syndicated all across the web - generating unlimited backlinks for you!

You need to find your own best method. Its not the same for everyone. Try out a few free methods that others has mentioned and track your results and see which one provides the most traffic. Keep using that method and try a couple of new methods. Test until you have got around 3 methods that bring you in traffic and focus just on those. Optimise them and they will be YOUR best methods.

There is no such thing as a free lunch To make the apparently free sources work for you requires meaningful investment of time and effort. Time being money, there is a cost attached.

That apart, it really depends on your niche. SEO is like where you start, the A, can't ignore that. Youtube, Guest Blogging can bring you targeted traffic and are easier to do - with some time and effort put in ofcourse

Erwin, plenty of free traffic ideas you got here, wish only that free was easy..

The 1 most important thing is to be creative when you try to drive traffic for free, because free means tons of competition!

And if you're creative you can generate free traffic using almost any online marketing tool or method;many people mentioned Youtube but I personally love Vimeo, Your Videos Belong Here and find the crowd there more willing to explore my videos offerings.

People mention social networks as if its easy to get new fans or likes nowdays that everyone uses the same methods. Once again you need to be creative and go to large sites like 9GAG - Just for Fun! or BuzzFeed and show presence , comment as your fan page and drive new traffic from outside the network to your page.

And so on, for every method to drive free traffic, you need to be creative enough because free doesn't mean easy..

Free traffic takes a significant amount of time in reaching a good number which is not ideal for a startup. Paid traffic can be built as soon as the website is launched with different paid methods for purchasing traffic.

Personally, I have been using WProbot with lots of success of course, my sites have around 10000 pages and I will send them thousands of backlinks via SENuke and other tools. Unique content targeting keywords with tens of thousands of searches in exact match will give you lots of traffic.

The best free traffic method for me is social media. Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram and Twitter. Has helped me market my services and products. Although it would take a lot of your time but its all worth it!

I wish people would stop referring to SEO as a "free" traffic source. It's the one that requires the most time and effort. Time and effort are not free. Nor are the tools and resources needed for tracking rankings, building links, purchasing links, etc. etc etc.....

Article marketing has always worked really well for me. I approach the main idea of the blog post (or wherever I want to send traffic) from different angles, and write up each angle as a different article on various article directories. My favorites are Squidoo.com, HubPages.com, and EzineArticles.com.

One of the benefits of this method is that it gets your same basic message in front of a lot more people. Another benefit is that if you use profit-sharing sites like Squidoo and HubPages, you can earn some extra cash. It's a bit time intensive, but it's free, it works, and there are tons of article directories you can use.

I agree with several of the comments here. If you are not generating any traffic to speak of yet, start with one source and build on it. As you start to get traffic from one source, add another and another over time. Before you know it, you will have developed a steady stream of visitors to you site. Good luck!

I just want to ask you what in your opinion is the best free traffic method?

Name just ONE. The one we all should do everyday and which is the most effective!

Thank you.

And see you on top.
Erwin.

Well, I think for me, Guest posting is the best. Producing quality content in your website and then promoting those in the social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Stumbleupon, Pinterest, YouTube etc are the great method to attract huge amount of traffic to your site.

Forum marketing still holds the number 1 spot for my highest converting traffic source. I really only spend time in forum although there are some other great options out there to capture different audiences.

The biggest reason this works well for me is that almost everyone there is either building an email list or wants to start, which makes my blog super helpful to the people who click through to my site.

The more you share, the more traffic you will get. Submit articles to sites like eZines which will use and distribute your article. Try Youtube a give also! The more distribution, the more traffic!

"SEO Traffic"

Search engine optimization is probably the most popular and best way to get consistent targeted traffic to your website. The only problem here is getting a good ranking.

Online Communities

Community websites are great as a free traffic source. By actively participating in discussions online you can drive a lot of traffic to your website. People participating in forums share many of the same problems. To be a part of the community in your niche would mean that you can share knowledge, learn, and stay motivated. You can be of service to others, and get plenty of traffic in return.

Start Squidoo

As a marketer, squidoo will come in handy. It is loved by Google when it comes to search engine rankings. Anyone can post topics of their choosing on squidoo and the fast paced search engine results can drive in loads of traffic.

Craigslist

With Craiglist, you can post up ads for free. Google loves Craigslist and your ads can be indexed within about twenty-four hours. Not only should you expect to see search engine results, but views from the many millions of visitors that visit Craiglist everyday.

I think it has been said but the key is to focus on one method to start and stay with that. Once you are generating traffic you can then move on.
So if you want train on youtube and then once you have that mastered move on to another one.
I have found that if you jump too early to anther one you will end up knowing a little about a lot but not knowing a lot about anything really......

I feel like this is an over asked and non efficient question bc marketing results can vary simply bc the time of day it is not bc of what method. Plus some methods work for products while they wouldn't even make sense for others.

For example: I can look up mlm / online marketing on FB and promote Pure Leverage all day for free and get people to sign up.... If i look for fat people and try to send them a message asking if they wanna lose weight I doubt that would create a sale

I have found that there is no "Best" single source. Over the years I have learned the most solid and successful strategy is diversifying your traffic portfolio. I have kept it a rule of thumb that if I receive more than 20% of my traffic from any one source I need to start working on the others and level things out.

I have never had to worry about a Panda or Penguin crushing my day, or a site getting acquired and shutting down comments or any other reason. I get spikes, and those are bonuses, but rarely do I ever see a dip because of this method.

I simply love email traffic. I basically will look for people who already have their own list of subscribers who might be interested in my offer and I will contact them to ask about buying solo ads from them. This is personally my favorite.

A few weeks back I lost most of my Google traffic. I did not cry or wine about it. I went to my Twitter account, and started posting, tweeting, engaging with my followers. Within one week 90% of my traffic came back. Now most of my traffic comes from Twitter.